Among
progressive and moderate religious believers, ecumenicalism is a big
deal. For many of these believers, being respectful of religious beliefs
that are different from theirs is a central guiding principle. In this
view, different religions are seen as a beautifully varied tapestry of
faith: each strand with its own truths, each with its own unique
perspective on God and its own unique way of worshipping him. Her. It.
Them. Whatever. Respecting other people’s religious beliefs is a
cornerstone of this worldview… to the point where criticizing or even
questioning anyone else’s religious belief is seen as rude and offensive
at best, bigoted and intolerant at worst.

Why?

Don’t
atheists want a world where everyone’s right to their own religious
views — including no religious views — is universally acknowledged?
Don’t we want a world with no religious wars or hatreds? Don’t we want a
world where a diversity of perspectives on religion is accepted and
even embraced? Why would atheists have any objections at all to the
principles of religious ecumenicalism?

Oh, let’s see. Where shall I begin?

Well, for starters: It’s bullshit.

Progressive
and moderate religious believers absolutely have objections to
religious beliefs that are different from theirs. Serious, passionate
objections. They object to the Religious Right; they object to Al Qaeda.
They object to right-wing fundamentalists preaching homophobic hatred,
to Muslim extremists executing women for adultery, to the Catholic
Church trying to stop condom distribution in AIDS-riddled Africa, to
religious extremists all over the Middle East trying to bomb each other
back to the Stone Age. Etc., etc., etc. Even when they share the same
nominal faith as these believers, they are clearly appalled at the
connection: they fervently reject being seen as having anything in
common with them, and often go to great lengths to distance themselves
from them.

And they should. I’m not saying they shouldn’t. In
fact, one of my main critiques of progressive believers is that their
opposition to hateful religious extremists isn’t vehement enough.But
it’s disingenuous at best, hypocritical at worst, to say that criticism
of other religious beliefs is inherently bigoted and offensive… and
then make an exception for beliefs that are opposed to your own. You
don’t get to speak out about how hard-line extremists are clearly
getting Christ’s message wrong (or Mohammad’s, or Moses’, or Buddha’s,
or whoever) — and then squawk about religious intolerance when others
say you’re the one getting it wrong. That’s just not playing fair.

And,
of course, it’s ridiculously hypocritical to engage in fervent
political and cultural discourse — as so many progressive ecumenical
believers do — and then expect religion to get a free pass. It’s absurd
to accept and even welcome vigorous public debate over politics,
science, medicine, economics, gender, sexuality, education, the role of
government, etc… and then get appalled and insulted when religion is
treated as just another hypothesis about the world, one that can be
debated and criticized like any other.

However, if ecumenicalism
were just hypocritical bullshit, I probably wouldn’t care very much.
Hypocritical bullshit is all over the human race like a cheap suit. I’m
not going to get worked up into a lather every time I see another
example of it. So why does this bug me so much?

Imagine the screams of outrage if this proposition were to advocate killing all Black people, or all Christians.

I'm a gun owner. I remember what other self proclaimed
German Christians did some 75 years ago. I will not go to my death
without taking at least one of these Taliban Anti-Christian Murderers
with me.Never Again!In the mean time tax the Churches and all their holdings at the same rate any other profit making business is taxed.Cade: I thank you, good people—there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score, and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.

Lawyer prepares initiative; state may have to let him collect signatures.

What
exactly to make of the proposed "Sodomite Suppression Act"? This ballot
initiative wasn't introduced in some African country, the Middle East,
or in Russia, but right here in California, home of many, many
sodomites. A lawyer by the name of Matt McLaughlin wants to change the
Golden State's penal code to make homosexual behavior a capital crime (pdf):

Seeing
that it is better that offenders should die rather than that all of us
should be killed by God's just wrath against us for the folly of
tolerating wickedness in our midst, the People of California wisely
command, in the fear of God, that any person who willingly touches
another person of the same gender for purposes of sexual gratification
be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient
method.

If the state refuses to enforce this law, it
says the general public is "empowered and deputized to execute all the
provisions hereunder extra-judicially, immune from any charge and
indemnified by the state from any and all liability." It's so bonkers
and evil that it almost comes full circle to be utterly hilarious, like
Marvin the Martian threatening to destroy Earth. Mind you, the location
is what makes it funny. Legislation like this would be exceedingly
dangerous elsewhere in the world. But in California, even if this guy
actually starts collecting signatures (that will make for some
interesting encounters in parking lots) and it ends up on the ballot,
the initiative could never be implemented, as it is blatantly
unconstitutional.

California's ballot initiative system, though,
does not appear to be able to stop him from moving forward with his
proposal and signature-gathering, even knowing full well it will never
be implemented. From the Sacramento Bee:

[T]he
measure is likely to proceed to the signature-gathering stage. At the
moment, its fate rests with state Attorney General Kamala Harris, who is
charged with writing a title and summary for the proposal. Legal
experts say she has little choice but to let the process continue and
that McLaughlin is unlikely to face professional repercussions.Over
the years, the $200 price tag for submitting an initiative has enabled
California political activists to draft and submit thousands of orphan
causes: eliminating divorce, requiring public schools to offer Christmas
caroling, making criminals of those who lie during political campaigns.

Carol
Dahmen, a media consultant in Sacramento who started the petition to
disbar McLaughlin, argues that this one is different. Along with
disbarment, Dahmen wants to draw attention to reforming the system,
calling McLaughlin the "poster boy of what is still wrong with the
initiative process."

"It's an interesting discussion about free
speech, and I get that," Dahmen said. "But this is a lawyer, and he's
advocating for murder."

The issue is who should make
the call that a ballot initiative is illegal. As an elected official
embroiled in state politics, letting the attorney general make that
choice could create serious problems in less clear-cut situations. As it
stands, Harris has been criticized (and sued)
for writing slanted summaries of ballot initiatives that affected the
possibility of their passage. It may have to be up to a judge to make
the call, if needed.

For
half a century, memories of the Holocaust limited anti-Semitism on the
Continent. That period has ended—the recent fatal attacks in Paris and
Copenhagen are merely the latest examples of rising violence against
Jews. Renewed vitriol among right-wing fascists and new threats from
radicalized Islamists have created a crisis, confronting Jews with an
agonizing choice.

All comes from the Jew; all returns to the Jew.”— Édouard Drumont (1844–1917), founder of the Anti-Semitic League of France

I. The Scourge of Our Time

The
French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, the son of Holocaust survivors,
is an accomplished, even gifted, pessimist. To his disciples, he is a
Jewish Zola, accusing France’s bien-pensant intellectual class of
complicity in its own suicide. To his foes, he is a reactionary whose
nostalgia for a fairy-tale French past is induced by an irrational fear
of Muslims. Finkielkraut’s cast of mind is generally dark, but when we
met in Paris in early January, two days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, he was positively grim.

“My
French identity is reinforced by the very large number of people who
openly declare, often now with violence, their hostility to French
values and culture,” he said. “I live in a strange place. There is so
much guilt and so much worry.” We were seated at a table in his
apartment, near the Luxembourg Gardens. I had come to discuss with him
the precarious future of French Jewry, but, as the hunt for the Charlie Hebdo killers seemed to be reaching its conclusion, we had become fixated on the television.

Finkielkraut
sees himself as an alienated man of the left. He says he loathes both
radical Islamism and its most ferocious French critic, Marine Le Pen,
the leader of France’s extreme right-wing—and once openly
anti-Semitic—National Front party. But he has lately come to find
radical Islamism to be a more immediate, even existential, threat to
France than the National Front. “I don’t trust Le Pen. I think there is
real violence in her,” he told me. “But she is so successful because
there actually is a problem of Islam in France, and until now she has
been the only one to dare say it.”

Suddenly, there was news: a
kosher supermarket in Porte de Vincennes, in eastern Paris, had come
under attack. “Of course,” Finkielkraut said. “The Jews.” Even before
anti-Semitic riots broke out in France last summer, Finkielkraut had
become preoccupied with the well-being of France’s Jews.We knew
nothing about this new attack—except that we already knew everything.
“People don’t defend the Jews as we expected to be defended,” he said.
“It would be easier for the left to defend the Jews if the attackers
were white and rightists.”

I asked him a very old Jewish question: Do you have a bag packed?

“We should not leave,” he said, “but maybe for our children or grandchildren there will be no choice.”

Reports
suggested that a number of people were dead at the market. I said
goodbye, and took the Métro to Porte de Vincennes. Stations near the
market were closed, so I walked through neighborhoods crowded with
police. Sirens echoed through the streets. Teenagers gathered by the
barricades, taking selfies. No one had much information. One young man,
however, said of the victims, “It’s just the Feuj.” Feuj, an inversion of Juif—“Jew”—is often used as a slur.

This
year, with good reason, Americans have celebrated the moment 50 years
ago when the struggle for civil rights for African-Americans reached a
decisive moment: the 1965 March from Selma to Montgomery. The movie Selma won an Oscar. President Obama went to Selma and gave one of his finest speeches.

Recent
racially charged incidents in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere have
prompted a near-universal reflexive response of black anger and white
guilt. Despite the achievement of the generation led by Martin Luther
King, Jr. in sweeping away the complex of laws that underpinned
segregation in the South, racial prejudice continues to taint the United
States like some kind of original sin. But the president was right to
push back against the idea that nothing has changed since 1965.

Not
only has the situation of African-Americans improved in many respects
but, as Obama put it, the civil rights movement also swung open "doors
of opportunity" for women, Latinos, Asian-Americans, gays and the
disabled. And it continues to offer inspiration for those fighting for
freedom around the world -- in Obama's words,
from "the streets of Tunis to the Maidan in Ukraine." If anyone has the
right to make this point, it is our half-African president.

Yet
what the president failed to point out is that, around the world,
segregation is making a comeback -- including in the streets of Tunis,
where the proponents of today's segregation spilled blood last week.

Fifty
years ago there were a host of legal impediments to equality between
black and white Americans -- just as there were in countries such as
South Africa and Rhodesia. Today, a different group is the victim of
comparable legal discrimination that imposes segregation on them and
denies them equal civil and political rights. What is more, their number
is vastly larger than the number that was affected 50 years ago by
segregation and apartheid. And that number is growing, because, unlike
in the 1960s Alabama, the prevalence of discriminatory legislation
outside the liberal West is actually increasing.

The system of law
I am talking about is sharia law, the body of legislation derived from
the Qur'an, the Hadith, and the rest of Islamic jurisprudence. And the
discriminated group I have in mind is women, though I could also
reference Jews, Christians and gays.

No group is more harmed by
sharia than Muslim women -- a reflection in part of the patriarchal
tribal culture out of which Islamic law emerged. Repeatedly, women are
considered under the code to be worth at most "half a man." Sharia
subordinates women to men in a multitude of ways: the requirement of
guardianship by men, the right of men to beat their wives, the right of
men to have unfettered sexual access to their wives, the right of men to
practice polygamy, and the restriction of women's legal rights in
divorce cases, in estate law, in cases of rape, in court testimony, and
in consent to marriage. Sharia states that women are considered naked if
any part of their body is showing except for their face and hands,
while a man is considered naked only between his navel and his knees.
Finally, although Muslim men may marry Christian or Jewish women, Muslim
women may only marry Muslim men.

Segregation, in short, is central to sharia -- a fact that no amount of contortion by self-styled Muslim feminists can get around.

True,
not all Muslim-majority countries apply sharia. In Tunisia, after a
heated internal debate, the Islamist Ennahda Movement -- which came to
power following the Arab Spring -- opted last year not to make sharia
the basis for the country's new constitution. But that is precisely the
kind of moderate policy explicitly targeted by whichever jihadist gang
carried out the Tunis museum massacre. And the troubling thing is that,
worldwide, sharia is gaining ground. In Brunei, for example, the Sultan
announced the introduction of sharia law last April. The advance of
organizations like Islamic State and Boko Haram mean the most brutal
application of sharia on a rising number of women and girls.There
seems to me only one possible way to react to this trend toward sharia
and that is to resist it. Perhaps that is more obvious to me than to
most; having lived under sharia when I was a young girl in Saudi Arabia I
know just what it means to be a second-class citizen. Yet many Western
liberals seem to struggle with the obvious point that if they were
against segregation and discrimination in the 1960s they should be
against gender segregation and discrimination now.

My most recent
book is an argument for a Muslim Reformation. It proposes a fundamental
five-point modification of Islamic doctrine designed to remove the
various incitements embedded in the Koran to engage in intolerance,
oppression and violence. The book
is addressed mainly to Muslims who are reluctant to follow me all the
way to apostasy, but who are prepared to acknowledge, if only to
themselves, that there are fundamental incompatibilities between their
faith and modernity. But I am also addressing Western liberals -- and
not only those at Brandeis University who last year saw fit to rescind
their institution's offer to me of an honorary degree.

violence
toward girls and women is particular to Islam or the Two-Thirds World,
thereby obscuring such violence in our midst among non-Muslims,
including on our own campus [and]... the hard work on the ground by
committed Muslim feminist and other progressive Muslim activists and
scholars, who find support for gender and other equality within the
Muslim tradition and are effective at achieving it.

Seriously? "Support for gender and other equality within
the Muslim tradition"? As for Muslim feminists "achieving" greater
equality, the evidence, as we have seen, is that women's rights in the
Muslim world are being rapidly eroded by the spread of Islamism.

Calling
Western feminists: People like me -- some of us apostates, most of us
dissident Muslims -- need your support, not your antagonism. We who have
known what it is to live without freedom watch with incredulity as you
who call yourselves liberals -- who claim to believe so fervently in
women's and minority rights -- make common cause with the forces in the
world that manifestly pose the greatest threats to just those things.

I
am now one of you: an American. I share with you the pleasures of the
seminar rooms and the campus cafés. I know we Western intellectuals
cannot lead a Muslim Reformation. But we do have an important role to
play. We must no longer accept limitations on criticism of Islam. We
must reject the notions that only Muslims can speak about Islam, and
that any critical examination of Islam is inherently "racist." Instead
of contorting Western intellectual traditions so as not to offend our
Muslim fellow citizens, we need to defend the Muslim dissidents who are
risking their lives to promote the human rights we take for granted:
equality for women, tolerance of all religions and orientations, our
hard-won freedoms of speech and thought.

Multiculturalism should
not mean that we tolerate another culture's intolerance. If we do in
fact support diversity, women's rights, and gay rights, then we cannot
in good conscience give Islam a free pass on that spurious ground.

Martin
Luther King's address before the Alabama state legislature on March 25,
1965, was defiant. "We are here," he declared, "and we are standing
before the forces of power in the state of Alabama saying, 'We ain't
goin' [to] let nobody turn us around.'" But King's message was also
nuanced. Racial segregation, he argued, was not "a natural result of
hatred between the races." Rather it was a political ploy by the
Southern elite to drive a wedge between former slaves and poor whites --
directed as much at the Populist movement as at African-Americans. "The
southern aristocracy," said
King, "took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. And when
his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could
not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that
no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than
the black man." Segregation was the "last outpost of psychological
oblivion."

I believe the same can be said today of the increasing
segregation of the sexes in Muslim communities here and in countries
like the ones I grew up in. The leaders of the Muslim world -- political
as well as religious -- know that they have no answer to the problems
of poverty and unemployment that afflict many Muslim communities,
including those in the West. But there is one thing they can offer to
young Muslim men -- one last outpost of psychological oblivion. And that
is not Jim Crow but sharia law: a psychological bird that tells him
that no matter how bad off he is, at least he was a man, better than a
woman.

I want to echo Martin Luther King. Yes, we Muslim reformers
are on the move and no bogus charge of Islamophobia can stop us. The
burning of our offices will not deter us. The bombing of our homes will
not dissuade us. The beating and killing of our leaders and young girls
will not divert us. The wanton release of known terrorists would not
discourage us. We are on the move now. Like an idea whose time has come,
not even the marching of mighty armies can halt us. We are moving to
the land of freedom.

My question to the liberals of 2015 is this.
You are very sure about what side you were on in 1965. But whose side
are you on today?

Will you march with us for Muslim women's civil
and political rights? Or will you wait half a century -- for the movie
of our march?

_________________

Ayaan Hirsi Ali's new book, Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now, is published
on March 24 by HarperCollins. She is a Fellow of the Future of
Diplomacy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a
Visiting Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute.

Monday, March 23, 2015

Sure makes me glad I no longer live in Cali. If I were an LGBT
person there I'd be sure to have a gun even if I had to do so
illegally. Remember the Taliban Christers passed Prop 8. Don't be the
unarmed Jew in Germany or Poland circa 1939.

Time for LGBT People to take a page from the Israeli book of self-defense.Be prepared to fight or leave.

Never Again!

For less than the cost of an Apple iPad, Matt McLaughlin started a statewide legal conversation.An
attorney from Huntington Beach, McLaughlin in late February spent $200
to propose a ballot measure that authorizes the killing of gays and
lesbians by “bullets to the head,” or “any other convenient method.”

McLaughlin’s “Sodomite Suppression Act”
now is testing the limits of free speech and raising the question: Why
can’t the state’s initiative process screen out blatantly illegal ideas?The
Legislature’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Caucus wrote a
letter to the State Bar, asking for an investigation into McLaughlin’s
fitness to practice law. More than 3,800 people signed a petition to
State Bar President Craig Holden asking that McLaughlin lose his law
license for advocating to “legalize the murder” of gays and lesbians.

Yet
the measure is likely to proceed to the signature-gathering stage. At
the moment, its fate rests with state Attorney General Kamala Harris,
who is charged with writing a title and summary for the proposal. Legal
experts say she has little choice but to let the process continue and
that McLaughlin is unlikely to face professional repercussions.

Over
the years, the $200 price tag for submitting an initiative has enabled
California political activists to draft and submit thousands of orphan
causes: eliminating divorce, requiring public schools to offer Christmas
caroling, making criminals of those who lie during political campaigns.

Carol
Dahmen, a media consultant in Sacramento who started the petition to
disbar McLaughlin, argues that this one is different. Along with
disbarment, Dahmen wants to draw attention to reforming the system,
calling McLaughlin the “poster boy of what is still wrong with the
initiative process.”

“It’s an interesting discussion about free
speech, and I get that,” Dahmen said. “But this is a lawyer, and he’s
advocating for murder.”

On Monday, Rabbi Denise Eger was installed
as the first openly gay president of Reform Judaism’s Central
Conference of American Rabbis, which claims around 2,000 rabbis and 862
congregations in the United States.

“It really shows an arc of
L.G.B.T. civil rights,” Eger told the New York Times. “I smile a lot —
with a smile of incredulousness.”

Eger’s new position is,
unquestionably, a historic moment for Reform Judaism. But when placed
alongside the greater American religious landscape, her achievement is
remarkable in part because of how common such stories have become. It’s
hardly the first time a mainstream American faith community has
proclaimed spiritual support for LGBT rights — the Reconstructionist
Rabbinical Association chose a lesbian Rabbi to be their president in
2007, Unitarian Universalists have been passing resolutions affirming
everyone regardless of their sexuality since 1970,
and several of the largest mainline Christian denominations have moved
to embrace various versions of LGBT rights. Since the early 2000s, the
United Church of Christ, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the Presbyterian Church (USA)
have all voted in favor of supporting gay ordination and same-sex
marriage, and the Episcopal Church famously elected Gene Robinson, an
openly gay man, to the position of bishop in 2003. And while the United
Methodist Church, the largest mainline Christian denomination,
officially opposes marriage equality and the ordination of LGBT
ministers, Methodist bishops and priests across the country are now refusing to enforce church discipline on clergy who officiate same-sex weddings. Meanwhile, nearly half of religious Americans see no conflict between their faith and LGBT rights.

Yet
even as equality advocates toast these victories, more
conservative-leaning faith traditions are doubling down on their
opposition to homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgender identity. This
trend isn’t necessarily astonishing, of course, but as more and more
religious Americans move to endorse equality, right-wing faithful are
struggling to confront an uncomfortable question: can anti-gay religious
groups survive in a country that embraces LGBT rights?

The
issue has become omnipresent at the national gatherings of evangelical
Christian institutions such as the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC),
whose leaders disavowed
destructive “ex-gay” therapy in 2014 but continue to enforce a
no-tolerance policy toward theologies that promote acceptance of
same-sex relationships. When a SBC pastor in California told his congregation
last year that he had adopted a conciliatory view of homosexuality, for
example, national-level officials promptly responded by kicking the church out of the denomination.
The larger evangelical community has also adopted a strategy of
silencing or rejecting believers who publicly endorse pro-LGBT views:
when World Vision, an evangelical charity, announced last March that it
would start hiring gay employees, funders began pulling money from the
organization, resulting in the group reversing its decision within 48 hours; Brandan Robertson, a young evangelical and author of the popular blog Revangelical, lost a book deal
in January after he refused to sign a pledge asking him not to
“condone, encourage or accept the homosexual lifestyle”; and in
February, the Evangelical Covenant Church denomination “terminated” its partnership with Christ Church: Portland after the pastor preached passionate support for LGBT acceptance.

Last
summer our family went to Southern Europe on holiday. During our stay
at a hotel, our son Dylan went to the swimming pool. A short time later
he came running back to the room, upset. A man at the pool had started
hurling insults at him.

My first instinct was to ask, “Were you misbehaving?”

“No,” Dylan told me through his tears.

I
stared at him. And suddenly I had an awful realization of what might
have caused the man's outrage: Dylan was wearing a Star of David.

After
calming him down, I went to the pool and asked the attendants to point
out the man who had yelled at him. We talked. It was not a pleasant
discussion. Afterward, I sat down with my son and said: “Dylan, you just
had your first taste of anti-Semitism.”

My father, Kirk Douglas,
born Issur Danielovitch, is Jewish. My mother, Diana, is not. I had no
formal religious upbringing from either of them, and the two kids I have
with Catherine Zeta-Jones are like me, growing up with one parent who
is Jewish and one who is not.

Several years ago Dylan, through his
friends, developed a deep connection to Judaism, and when he started
going to Hebrew school and studying for his bar mitzvah, I began to
reconnect with the religion of my father.

While some Jews believe
that not having a Jewish mother makes me not Jewish, I have learned the
hard way that those who hate do not make such fine distinctions.

Dylan's
experience reminded me of my first encounter with anti-Semitism, in
high school. A friend saw someone Jewish walk by, and with no
provocation he confidently told me: “Michael, all Jews cheat in
business.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“Michael, come on,” he replied. “Everyone knows that.”

With
little knowledge of what it meant to be a Jew, I found myself
passionately defending the Jewish people. Now, half a century later, I
have to defend my son. Anti-Semitism, I've seen, is like a disease that
goes dormant, flaring up with the next political trigger.

Evidence for the damaging effects of “toxins” is thin on the
ground — as in, scientists claim that the kinds of toxins that are
eliminated via these diets not only don’t, but can’t possibly exist.

As Edzard Ernst, emeritus professor of complementary medicine at Exeter University told The Guardian‘s
Dara Mohammadi, “there are two types of detox: one is respectable and
the other isn’t.” The former involves the medical treatment of people
with life-threatening drug addictions, whereas “[t]he other is the word
being hijacked by entrepreneurs, quacks and charlatans to sell a bogus
treatment that allegedly detoxifies your body of toxins you’re supposed
to have accumulated.”

If the human body did accumulate toxins in the manner that detox advocates claim, people wouldn’t need a detox — they’d be dead.

“The
healthy body has kidneys, a liver, skin, even lungs that are
detoxifying as we speak,” he said. “There is no known way — certainly
not through detox treatments — to make something that works perfectly
well in a healthy body work better.”

Many of these detox products claim to “cleanse” the toxins stored in the liver — but toxins aren’t stored in the liver.
The liver processes harmful substances that enter the body and
transform them into water-soluble compounds that can be excreted. Yet
health food store shelves are stocked with teas and tinctures — as well
as hair brushes and shampoos — that promise to somehow rid the body of
these mysterious toxins.

Colonic irrigation is not as palpably
absurd as a hairbrush that can cleanse toxins from the liver, but it’s
no more based in science. Enema and colon cleanse advocates claim that the walls of the colon contain a toxin-housing “plaque” that slow releases the dreaded compounds into the body.

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

I have long been bothered by the way in which the transgender
movement has disconnected female from woman. Gender, gender, gender
clearly oppresses women as it defines them by adherence to social roles.
Substituting gender for sex is the antithesis of feminism which attacks the way gender is used to oppress women.Anyone who doesn't get that one needs to spend a while wading through Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex."Placating the transgender movement shouldn't require the redefinition of feminism.From The Nation:http://www.thenation.com/article/201289/who-has-abortions#

We
can, and should, support trans men and other gender-non-conforming
people without erasing women from the fight for reproductive rights.

Who
has abortions? For most of human history, the answer was obvious: women
have abortions. Girls have abortions. Not any more. People have
abortions. Patients have abortions. Men have abortions. “We
must acknowledge and come to terms with the implicit cissexism in
assuming that only women have abortions,” wrote feminist activist Lauren
Rankin in July 2013 in truthout.com. She went on to criticize as exclusionary slogans like “the War on Women” and “Stand with Texas Women.”

Such
claims may sound arcane to most people. One area in which they have
been quietly effective, though, is in reproductive-rights activism.
Abortion funds, which offer help paying for an abortion when Medicaid or
insurance won’t, have become a thriving hub of grassroots feminism.
They draw hundreds of activists, young and old, to donate countless
hours to provide direct service and advocate for better funding for
abortion. In the past few years, a number of the funds have quietly
removed references to “women” from their messaging in order to be more
welcoming to trans men and others who do not identify as women but can
still become pregnant. The New York Abortion Access Fund changed its
language in 2012. Its mission statement now mentions “anyone,” “every
person” and “the people who call our hotline.” The Eastern Massachusetts
Abortion Fund helps “callers,” the Lilith Fund helps “Texans.” Last
year Fund Texas Women, which pays travel and hotel costs in the wake of
the closing of many clinics in the state, became Fund Texas Choice.
(“Choice” is a problematic word too, but that’s a subject for another
day.) In a message to supporters, co-founder Lenzi Scheible wrote, “with
a name like Fund Texas Women, we were publicly excluding trans* people
who needed to get an abortion but were not women. We refuse to deny the
existence and humanity of trans* people any longer.”

I’m going to
argue here that removing “women” from the language of abortion is a
mistake. We can, and should, support trans men and other
gender-non-conforming people. But we can do that without rendering
invisible half of humanity and 99.999 percent of those who get pregnant.
I know I’ll offend, hurt and disappoint some people, including
abortion-fund activists I love dearly. That is why I’ve started this
column many times over many months and put it aside. I tell myself I
might be wrong—it’s happened before. “Most of the pressure [to shift
language] comes from young people,” said one abortion-fund head I
interviewed, whose fund, like many, has “Women” in its name. “The role
of people in our generation is to give money and get out of the way.”
(Like many of the people I interviewed for this column, she asked to
remain anonymous.) Maybe in ten years, it will seem perfectly natural to
me to talk about abortion in a gender-neutral way. Right now, though,
it feels as if abortion language is becoming a bit like French, where
one man in a group of no matter how many women means “elles” becomes
“ils.”

From the perspective of providing care, I understand it.
“The focus should be on access,” NYAAF board member Rye Young told me
over the phone. The primary purpose of abortion funds is to provide
immediate financial and other help to individuals in crisis, whom
funders usually know only as voices on the phone. If wording on a
website makes people feel they can’t make that phone call, that’s not
good. We women have had enough experience with being disrespected by
healthcare and social-service providers not to wish that on anyone else.
Does presenting abortion as gender-neutral need to be part of that
welcoming procedure, though? The primary sources of abortion data in the
US—the CDC and the Guttmacher Institute—don’t collect information on
the gender identity of those who seek abortion, but conversations with
abortion providers and others suggest the number of transgender men who
want to end a pregnancy is very low. I don’t see how it denies “the
existence and humanity of trans people” to use language that describes
the vast majority of those who seek to end a pregnancy. Why can’t
references to people who don’t identify as women simply be added to
references to women? After all, every year over 2,000 men get breast
cancer and over 400 die, and no one is calling for “women” to be cut out
of breast-cancer language so that men will feel more comfortable
seeking treatment. If there was such a call, though, I wonder what would
happen. Women have such a long history of minimizing themselves in
order not to hurt feelings or seem self-promoting or
attention-demanding. We are raised to put ourselves second, and too
often, still, we do.

The real damage of abolishing “women” in
abortion contexts, though, is to our political analysis. What happens to
Dr. Tiller’s motto, “Trust Women”? There was a whole feminist
philosophy expressed in those two words: women are competent moral
actors and they, not men, clergy or the state, are the experts on their
own lives, and should be the ones to decide how to shape them.

People who choose homeopathy may put their health at risk, says Australian study.

Homeopathy
is not effective for treating any health condition, Australia’s top
body for medical research has concluded, after undertaking an extensive
review of existing studies.

Homeopaths believe that illness-causing substances can, in minute doses, treat people who are unwell.

By
diluting these substances in water or alcohol, homeopaths claim the
resulting mixture retains a “memory” of the original substance that
triggers a healing response in the body.

These claims have been widely disproven by multiple studies, but the National Health
and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has for the first time thoroughly
reviewed 225 research papers on homeopathy to come up with its position
statement, released on Wednesday.

“Based on the assessment of the
evidence of effectiveness of homeopathy, NHMRC concludes that there are
no health conditions for which there is reliable evidence that
homeopathy is effective,” the report concluded.

“People who choose
homeopathy may put their health at risk if they reject or delay
treatments for which there is good evidence for safety and
effectiveness.”

An independent company also reviewed the studies and appraised the evidence to prevent bias.Chair
of the NHMRC Homeopathy Working Committee, Professor Paul Glasziou,
said he hoped the findings would lead private health insurers to stop
offering rebates on homeopathic treatments, and force pharmacists to
reconsider stocking them.

Some people are more privileged than others. Talking about class is even more taboo than talking about race.

One
American Dream used to be owning your own business and working for
yourself. It wasn't having some jerk with an MBA and efficiency studies
ride your ass, while you stand for hours on the concrete floor of a big
box store.

But the elites of degree bearing privileged folks have turned that one into hell.

Welcome to the nightmare you folks created. Bet y'all thought it could never happen to you.

Two years, almost 750 job applications. Not one viable offer. This is what the American Dream has been reduced to

When Ron applies for hundreds of jobs and no one calls back with an offer? The Black Cloud. When his daughter applies for her dream position and someone else gets it? The Black Cloud. Or when he and his wife Sue celebrate their anniversary with a dinner out and they suffer pangs of guilt over the bill?

Sue shakes her head and tries to explain this concept at her dining room table.

“There’s that black cloud again.’’

The
black cloud – this nagging sense that things will go wrong and never
get quite right again – appeared over the Dziudas’ life in July 2009
when he lost his sales and marketing job at industrial components-maker
Misumi USA. At first, it didn’t seem that bad. This father of four had
lost jobs before. His experience, smarts and can-do attitude always
helped him bounce back.

But this was in the depths of America’s
most punishing economic crisis since the Great Depression. Unemployment
was rising fast and job-seekers of any age were having the toughest
times of their lives finding work. And Ron wasn’t just any age – at 54,
he started finding his gray hair and crow’s feet overshadowed his
expertise and energy.

So the black cloud moved in to stay. For
three years – 33 months, to be exact – Ron endured a drumbeat of
humiliations: he lost his job, his savings, his confidence. He and Sue
burned down their retirement accounts one by one; they borrowed from
their own son to pay the mortgage; they racked up credit card debt to
put food on the table. Ron applied for 800 jobs. One night he turned to
Sue and confessed he didn’t think he’d ever get back on his feet.

He
finally emerged in the spring of 2012 with a position selling
sandblasters for Pangborn Group. At last he was out of the woods. But
the black cloud barely budged. They shake their heads when I ask if
they’ll ever feel secure again.

“Now to rebuild everything I had,
and build from there and even try to build for retirement? It’s going to
be incredible,’’ Ron says. “I mean all the credit cards are maxed out,
so those got to be paid off, and there’s no equity in the house …’’

Sue is blunter.

“I’ll still live in fear,’’ she says. “I don’t know if I’ll ever feel comfortable.’’

Monday, March 16, 2015

Atheists can do more than not-believe: they can help others while we're all here

Adam LeeSunday 15 March 2015

It’s
time for atheists to move past theoretical questions about the
existence of God and onto more practical pursuits – like how to fight
for justice.

The atheist community is quickly coming up against
the limits of debating whether God is real. The New Atheist movement
made a splash in the early 2000s with its brash assertion that the
existence of God was a hypothesis that can be examined, debated and
critically analyzed like any other, and rejected if the evidence is
found wanting. Its critiques, targeting both the feverish imaginings of
fundamentalism and the stale platitudes of conventional piety, were as
cleansing and welcome as a cool breeze in a stuffy room.

But while
that stance can be the beginning of a philosophy, it can’t be the end.
It raises the question: once you no longer believe the claims of
religion, what do you believe?

For many, being an atheist
makes this world and life infinitely more significant, since they’re
all we have. Having seen so many examples of oppression, injustice and
violence promoted by religion, atheists can and should have a strong
reason to desire justice in society. That’s why atheist groups,
especially atheist student groups, are increasingly joining forces with other social change movements and emphasizing how their goals and ours intersect.

The
oldest and strongest example is secular groups’ support for LGBT
rights, since we’ve long recognized that the primary opposition to them
in America and other Western nations comes almost entirely from
religion. In the pending US supreme court case that could establish
same-sex marriage nationwide, two venerable national secular groups, the
American Humanist Association and the Center for Inquiry, submitted a friend-of-the-court brief urging the justices to rule for marriage equality.

At
the thinnest end of the wedge, in places where equal rights for
same-sex couples is a radical and fiercely controversial proposition,
atheists are present too. Amanda Scott, a paralegal student and humanist
celebrant in Mobile, Alabama, weathered a storm of harassment
when she spoke up against a proposal to put religious plaques on
government buildings. She’s also the founder of Mobile Equality, a
non-profit group dedicated to educating the public on LGBT rights.

The
most obvious reason for this change is growing racial diversity. Most
Americans still identify as Christian, but “Christian” is a group that
is less white and less Protestant than it has been at any time in
history. The massive growth in Hispanic Catholics, in particular, has
been a major factor in this shift in the ethnic and religious identity
of this country. White Catholics used to outnumber Hispanic Catholics 3
to 1 in the 2000s, but now it’s only by a 2 to 1 margin.

But
another major reason religious diversity is outpacing the growth of
racial/ethnic diversity is largely due to the explosive growth in
non-belief among Americans. One in five Americans now identifies as
religiously unaffiliated. In 13 states, the “nones” are the largest
religious group. Non-religious people now equal Catholics in number, and
their proportion is likely to grow dramatically, as young people are by
far the most non-religious group in the country. This isn’t some kind
of side effect of their youth, either. As Adam Lee has noted, the millennial generation is becoming less religious as they age.

These
changes explain the modern political landscape as well as any economic
indicator. While not all white Christians are conservative, these
changing numbers definitely suggest that conservative Christians are
rapidly losing their grip on power. And while some non-white Christians
are conservative, their numbers are not making up for what the Christian
right is losing. And whether conservative leaders are aware of the
exact numbers or not, it’s clear that they sense that change is in the
air. Just by speaking to young people, turning on your TV, or reading
the Internet, you can sense the way the country is lurching away from
conservative Christian values and towards a more liberal, secular
outlook. And conservative Christians aren’t taking these changes well at
all.

To look at the Christian right now is to see a people who
know they are losing power and are desperately trying to reassert
dominance before it’s lost altogether. The most obvious example of this
is the frenzy of anti-abortion activity in recent years. Anti-choice
forces have controlled the Republican Party since the late ’70s, but
only in the past few years have they concentrated so single mindedly on
trying to destroy legal abortion in wide swaths of the country. In 2011
alone, states passed nearly three times as many abortion restrictions as they had in any previous year.

Actress
Patricia Arquette continued her rallying call for equal pay Tuesday
night at the UN Women’s Planet 50-50 by 2030 event, which commemorated
20 year anniversary of the historic World Conference on Women in
Beijing. She was one of many women to take the stage and call for gender
equality on a roster that included former Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton and Melinda Gates, to name a few.)

Arquette
— who acknowledges that she’s not a longtime advocate — quickly rose as
a champion for pay equality, after making a fiery call for the end of
the wage gap during her Oscar speech. The actress’ rallying cry,
however, was quickly marred by controversial remarks made offstage,
which displayed a startling lack of intersectionality.

During
her Tuesday speech, Arquette doubled down on her call for pay equality
and took steps to correct her previous comments, making sure to include
all women in the quest for equal incomes.Of course there were
still a few foibles. Arquette started on shaking footing, seemingly
unused to the advocacy platform that so many politicians are used to
holding, and at the international event, geared towards tackling women’s
rights on a global scale, Arquette chose to focus solely on the United
States. However, as the speech built to a crescendo, it was hard to
ignore Arquette’s passion, power and how important it was that she even
chose to stand up. Excerpts from the speech are below.Arquette
began by addressing critics who took issue with her speaking out for
wage equality due to her successful acting career and material wealth.

“I
want to tell you, as a child there were times where I lived below the
poverty line, literally not having shoes to wear that fit me….If I told
you that I was a single mother at 20, who lived with my baby in a
converted garage, and that I was afraid for my baby’s nutrition while
nursing because I could only afford to eat macaroni and cheese mixed
with water for weeks, so I could afford diapers that would also be true.

“But
truer still is that my past hardships are irrelevant to why I’m here.
I’m not a longstanding activist. I’m not an academic, but there’s
something that I am that compels me to speak out. And it’s not because
I’m an actor or a women. It’s simply the fact that I am a human. I am an
American. I see what is happening to women in America.”

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Madonna
knows what every woman knows if she is at all honest about the world
and how women are treated. Things really haven't changed for most women
since the days when Simone de Beauvoir wrote Le Deuxième Sexe
(The Second Sex) in 1949. Women are imprisoned in the role of lesser
human beings by gender, gender, gender far more than they are by any
physical of intellectual limitations.Gay men are men first
and foremost. With all the perks that go with having a dick and balls.
Yes gay men do have a lesser status than straight men, but nonetheless
they are men with male privilege.Indeed
much of the oppression experienced by trans-women is the same oppression
experienced by all women. Including the violence experienced by those
who work the streets or go in harms way at times of the night and in
neighborhoods where the armored up cops ride two to a car and won't get
out of the car without back up.Gender,
gender, gender has been used since the start of the Second Wave Feminist
Movement to undermine both feminism and any gains made by women.It
is time for women, all women including lesbians, bi-women, trans-women
and women of color to focus their energies on putting women first and
not only preventing further erosion of our rights but on the struggle to
gain full equality.Time to stand up for
and fight for the rights of women. Until we have equality with men we
need to focus on our own struggles because damned few men seem willing
to fight for our equality.From Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelangelo-signorile/how-madonna-succumbed-to_b_6855112.htmlMichelangelo Signorile03/12/2015It's happened to many seasoned LGBT activists, to many progressives, to many in the media, and to other celebrities (like Patricia Arquette), so why shouldn't it happen to Madonna?

Gay
rights are way more advanced than women's rights. People are a lot more
open-minded to the gay community than they are to women, period. It's
moved along for the gay community, for the African-American community,
but women are still just trading on their ass. To me, the last great
frontier is women.

And this is where, on LGBT rights,
Madonna has succumbed to what I call "victory blindness" (which is
title of the first chapter of my soon-to-be-released book).
She and many others are intoxicated by the heady whirl of victory --
which the media magnifies in an extraordinary way -- and appear to
believe, living within this seductive moment of advances for LGBT
rights, that we've "arrived" and the rest of it is inevitable.

Madonna
is absolutely right about women and the backlash to their equality. But
it is precisely because of that backlash and what it teaches us that
she is absolutely wrong about LGBT equality. Women's equality stalled,
experiencing a backlash that took feminists by surprise in the '80s, and
it's a backlash that they are battling right up until this day. But
only in hindsight can the backlash be seen.

In the moment, during
the heyday of the '70s and federal legislation and Supreme Court rulings
upholding women's autonomy, many women thought full equality was
inevitable, exactly like many LGBT activists, progressives, some in the
media -- and Madonna -- seem to think today about LGBT equality. Many
feminists celebrated and talked of how they'd "advanced." Many women
stopped paying attention, became apathetic, thinking the fight was won,
while the enemies of women's equality were working fiercely to roll
things back.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson